If you're a Leaving Cert student with an interest in becoming an influencer, your time to shine may have arrived at last.
Digital Hustle Summer School ran a third-level influencer course at Carlow IT at the end of June, aimed at helping students improve their "online presence" or to create campaigns and visual identities. Now, according to today's Times, they intend to increase their output by offering a course to second-level students as well.
Influencer course offered to secondary pupilshttps://t.co/CSmEbVkeDF
— Mark Tighe (@MarkLTighe) July 21, 2021
The programme's director, Irene McCormack told the Times that she was hoping for additional funding to allow the course to be offered as part of local Transition Year programmes.
We had a huge response to the course but when you do something novel, it’s great the first year and everybody loves it. I think it might be better as a winter school and in that case, it would be really good if we could do it during College Awareness Week in November. A TY co-ordinator could offer it to students and it would be good to do it through the schools as well.
The course saw huge numbers sign up, with 240 applications and over 80 people attending the course every day.
Digital Hustle summer school enlisted the services of two of Ireland's most followed social media personalities, Lauren Whelan and Nia Gall, to speak to students and give them an insight into their lives as influencers - as well as international marketing experts.
https://www.tiktok.com/@laurenwhelxn/video/6985950312783727877?lang=en&is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=6917583537793484294
One focus of the course was the science behind social media programmes, and McCormick spoke to the Times about how this had crossed over with promotion of vaccination campaigns.
In the morning we had international speakers introducing students to the theory of influencing and the idea that there are theories of psychology that underpin how people behave when they’re influencing.
We had one woman, Dr Amelia Burke-Garcia, an expert in health influencing, and she was talking about how influencers are used to get people vaccinated and promote health messages. There’s a very legitimate psychology behind it all.
For anyone looking to make their name with TikTok fame, it looks like the influencer course for you is out there - and the plans are in place to make them available for TY students sooner rather than later.
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